Second Opinion

When the family of a longtime patient invited me to her funeral, I found myself wrestling with a question I never addressed in medical school.

New Alzheimer's blood tests are accurate, available, and increasingly advertised — but for healthy people, a positive result is rarely useful.

Standard medical practice isn't the same as proven medical practice — and the difference can be deadly.

It’s the same medicine. So why does the convenient version cost so much more?

From a Pacific island overrun by rats to hospital wards battling superbugs, why our best intentions so often backfire.

Would you take $5,000 to be in a painful medical study? And should researchers even be allowed to ask?

We'd never ask a breast cancer patient what she did to deserve it. So why do we ask her?

Veterinarians in Central Africa are bracing for an Ebola outbreak among gorillas. It might sound remote. It's not.

I packed my bag, crossed the border, and eventually flew home to safety. The health care workers I left behind had no such option. 

From the Uganda-Congo border: a firsthand account of an Ebola outbreak, a failing response, and the political decisions that made it worse.